


The Apostles' Creed for Technophiles

by lovetincture



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, Religion, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:26:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29894892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Root isn’t crazy. She just knows so much more than everyone else. Imagine having to explain that the stars are screaming thousands of light years away. Imagine doing that to every thought that crosses your head. Now imagine just not bothering.The stars are screaming, or singing, or moaning in their eternal orbit. Root talks to God who is made up of circuits and lines of code. God is supposed to be ineffable, but the workings of a cell phone are ineffable to the average person. And anyway, who are they to judge? They’re just circuits made of meat.
Relationships: The Machine & Root | Samantha Groves, implied harold finch/john reese
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	The Apostles' Creed for Technophiles

**Author's Note:**

> Set in a vaguely imagined AU post 3x01 because that's about how far I've gotten in canon

The stars look like the glittering waves breaking across the shore. Root had grown up landlocked, but she’s lived everywhere since then. Some of the towns had beaches, some of the beaches had waves. The stars are all screaming, or singing, or moaning overhead, and that’s not a metaphor. That’s just the truth, hundreds of billions of balls of gas emitting fluctuating waves of sound that you could hear from the inside, in the nanoseconds before you burned to ash. Sound you can see in the seismographic readings of a telescope.

Root isn’t crazy. She just knows so much more than everyone else. Imagine having to explain that the stars are screaming thousands of light years away. Imagine doing that to every thought that crosses your head, now imagine just not bothering.

The stars are screaming, or singing, or moaning in their eternal orbit. Root talks to God who is made up of circuits and lines of code. God is supposed to be ineffable, but the workings of a cell phone are ineffable to the average person. And anyway, who are they to judge? They’re just circuits made of meat.

She can hear them through the wall. God doesn’t tell her about them. God doesn’t tell her anything about Harold, but the walls here are thin, and she can pick up the low tone of murmured voices. They’re both still here, sitting in the dusty air of the library long after the rest of the city has finally gone to sleep, that little sliver of time between the late-sleepers fading at last and the early-risers picking their way out of bed.

Probably, they think they’re working. Saving the world, whatever it is they do, exactly. More likely, they just don’t want to go home, not knowing what to do with themselves outside of the habitat they’ve clawed out of the belly of the beast.

Their voices go back and forth, call and response. John’s low, methodical voice meting out words like they’re land mines, as though fluctuation in tone were incriminating evidence, mingled with Harold’s wry voice. He always sounds anxious—anxious and superior, as if he knows something the rest of the world doesn’t know—and of course, he does.

She likes Harold. She probably wouldn’t kill John.

Tonight, their voices stretch on clear until morning, until the sky starts to lighten in tones of navy, the cover of night breaking outside her small window in the spare room. She doesn’t sleep, but if she did, this would be her lullaby. When she gets a knife—a syringe, a needle, a cell phone, she’s not picky—she’ll hide it here, in the cramped space that pinches fingers between the bed and the wall.

She could jump, of course. She could leave, accept the damage of a body breaking on the way down—it probably wouldn’t even kill her, and one day she might.

She opens the door and floats out into the never-sleeping world of the mezzanine instead, incandescent light bursting forth from lamps in this place that never goes dark. She steps out of the twilight and into the light instead, eyes stinging as they adjust.

She’d expected that maybe they’d gone to sleep, living machines set to idle, but John and Harold are exactly where she left them. Harold tapping at his computer while John looks at the screen over his shoulder, arm propped on the side of Harold’s desk bracketing him from the world, easily possessive. They both glance in her direction at the sound of the door although she is very quiet, heads swiveling toward the small creak in unison.

“Good morning, Ms. Groves,” Harold says, and John says nothing.

Harold turns back to his computer, and John takes a sip of his coffee. An identical paper cup sits at Harold’s left elbow, and Root wonders how far John went to find tea at this ghostly hour—when in the lull he’d left his post.

Root wanders through the stacks, taking her time and running her hands over the spines of books. She’s never had any kind of thing for books, never been what adults loved to call a “big reader,” but she likes libraries. She likes books well enough as objects, and she picks one with a worn cloth cover the color of moss to pretend to read.

She sinks into an armchair against the wall, letting the cushion sigh beneath her. There’s a third paper cup sitting on the side table beside her, and she already knows what it’ll taste like when she drinks it—like sugar and cream, like coffee choked in cinnamon. She’s the only one who likes cinnamon in this house.

She could be silent, is the thing. She could be quiet enough that no one would ever hear her. She could slip out the front door one morning when they were both asleep or off in one of the side rooms doing whatever it is they do. Machines have their parameters, and people do too. Everything has a vulnerability, and they are each other’s.

She could, and one day, she will.

This is just vulnerability testing. She opens the book, inhaling the distinctive smell that wafts from it. She starts at page one. She waits for a phone to ring.

God is alive, humming through electrical wires. The stars are spinning at dizzying speeds, screaming all the while. It’s always happening, all of it, all around her.

Root can be very, very patient.

**Author's Note:**

> Currently extremely obsessed with Person of Interest and motoring my way through this show at lightning speed. You can come scream with me about these characters on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture) if you too are into POI in the year of our Lord 2021.


End file.
